Wall Street rises on bank results, but Google sinks late (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Stocks rose for the third straight day on Thursday, sparked by results from Bank of America and Morgan Stanley and as the latest jobless claims dropped to a near four-year low.

The S&P 500 hit a fresh five-month high, with the industrials, consumer discretionary stocks and financials leading gains.

Tech shares advanced ahead of earnings from a number of bellwethers expected after the close.

But reports after the bell were mixed. Google (GOOG.O) fell short of Wall Street's lofty expectations, and its shares dropped 10 percent to $575.50.

"Google was the big disappointment because so much of their emphasis is developing products, specifically Android, where more dollars are going out than they anticipated," said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.

In the regular session, Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) climbed 2.4 percent to $6.96 after it reported it swung to a fourth-quarter profit from a year-ago loss. Morgan Stanley (MS.N) reported a loss that was narrower than expected, sparking a 5.4 percent jump in its stock to $18.28.

"We think (financials) have pretty much bottomed here in the U.S.," said Paul Simon, chief investment officer at Tactical Allocation Group in Birmingham, Michigan.

"They represent some compelling value. We think a lot of the bad news has been discounted, and you've seen stock prices rallying in the beginning of the year," said Simon, whose firm has been buying financials.

Financial shares have rallied since the start of the year. The S&P financial index (.GSPF) is up 8.1 percent so far for 2012, helping to push the S&P 500 up 4.5 percent for the year.

In the latest snapshot of the U.S. economy, data showed the number of Americans filing for new jobless benefits dropped to nearly a four-year low last week. It added to views that the economy is slowly moving forward.

The Dow Jones industrial average (.DJI) rose 45.03 points, or 0.36 percent, to end at 12,623.98. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index (.SPX) gained 6.46 points, or 0.49 percent, to 1,314.50. The Nasdaq Composite Index (.IXIC) climbed 18.62 points, or 0.67 percent, to close at 2,788.33.

Semiconductor stocks also advanced, with the PHLX SOX Index (.SOX) rising 1.9 percent. Xilinx Inc (XLNX.O) shot up 1 percent to $35.64 a day after issuing an upbeat forecast.

IBM UP LATE, AMEX SLIPS

Among other major tech companies reporting after the close, IBM (IBM.N) said it sees 10 percent earnings growth in 2012, and its shares rose 2.5 percent to $184.94.

Shares of Microsoft (MSFT.O) gained 1.9 percent to $28.64 in extended trading, and shares of Intel (INTC.O) added 0.5 percent to $25.75, both after reporting results.

American Express (AXP.N) also posted results after the bell, and its shares slid 1.9 percent in extended trading to $49.98.

In a sign of optimism about Europe, both Spain and France drew strong demand at government debt auctions.

With the S&P 500 having broken above the 1,300 level, it looks set to hit the 1,360-1,370 area, said Bruce Zaro, chief technical strategist at Delta Global Asset Management in Boston.

"That (area) represents the May 2011 high ... and I believe we will see that during this earnings season," Zaro said.

The Dow Jones Transportation Average (.DJT) gained 1.6 percent, with shares of Union Pacific Corp (UNP.N) rising 2.2 percent to $112.18 after reporting quarterly profit and revenue that beat estimates.

Volume totaled about 7.6 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Amex and Nasdaq, above the daily average of 6.68 billion, and the highest since December 16.

Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones by a ratio of about 2 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange. On the Nasdaq, nearly three stocks rose for every two that fell.

(Reporting By Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Ryan Vlastelica and Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Jan Paschal)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/stocks/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120119/bs_nm/us_markets_stocks

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Osborne discussed how Japan, UK can work with IMF on Europe

By Stanley White

TOKYO | Wed Jan 18, 2012 7:38am GMT

TOKYO (Reuters) - Chancellor George Osborne said on Wednesday he discussed with Japanese officials how Britain and Japan can work with Group of 20 countries and the International Monetary Fund to deal with Europe's sovereign debt crisis.

Osborne, who spoke after separate meetings with Japan's prime minister and finance minister, did not give details of their discussions on the issue.

Financial markets are on edge as mass ratings downgrades in Europe and pressure on Greece to secure a deal with its creditors over reduced interest payments on its debt threaten to worsen Europe's sovereign debt crisis and harm the global economy.

"We talked about the global economic situation and how Japan and Britain can work together through the G20 and the IMF in helping reduce the instability in the world," Osborne told reporters.

"We talked specifically about the euro zone crisis and what we need to see from euro zone countries in dealing with that crisis."

Osborne is visiting China and Japan this week in a drive to attract Asian investment and to lessen Britain's dependence on trade with the crisis-hit euro zone.

He said he talked with the Japanese ministers about Iran's nuclear ambitions and they agreed Iran should not have nuclear weapons.

Osborne also agreed with his Japanese counterpart Jun Azumi to seek ways to provide more resources to the IMF, depending on Europe's own efforts, a Japanese finance ministry official said.

The ministers also shared concern about the potential negative impact of the U.S. Volcker Rule on the global economy and financial markets, the official said.

The U.S. could reinforce sanctions against Iran by using the Volcker rule, which limits banks' trading, against firms that fail to comply. Tokyo is worried it could make trading in Japanese government bonds less attractive and profitable.

The two sides did not discuss currency issues, the official said. Japan has intervened in the currency market to sell the yen so as to protect its exporters, a potential source of friction with other governments who do not approve of such action.

U.S. rating agency Standard & Poor's cut its credit rating of the euro zone's EFSF rescue fund on Monday, following a mass downgrades three days earlier to nine of the 17 euro zone members, saying policymakers have not done enough to curb the two-year old sovereign debt crisis. Britain is outside the euro zone and maintains its top credit rating.

Greece risks going bankrupt when 14.5 billion euros (12 billion pounds) of bond redemptions fall due in late March. Without a private-sector bond swap involving a voluntary writedown, a 130 billion euro second international bailout for Greece could fall apart.

(Additional reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by Joseph Radford and Michael Watson)

Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/18/uk-japan-osborne-imf-idUKTRE80H09B20120118?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

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Your Next Party Trick: Turn Water into Whiskey [Video]

Filmmaker Casey Neistat shows a neat trick that can turn a shot full of water into a shot filled with whiskey all through... magic? Sleight of hand? Devil's work? Destiny? No. DENSITY. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/wrYdCOMX0Tc/your-next-party-trick-turn-water-into-whiskey

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Why should we stop online piracy?

Continue reading page |1 |2

Congressional bill names are a reliable indicator of the state of conventional wisdom in the US. That Congress is weighing bills called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) tells us that, at a minimum, the idea of stopping online piracy is popular.

It shouldn't be. There's no evidence that the US is currently suffering from an excessive amount of online piracy, and there is ample reason to believe that a non-zero level of copyright infringement is socially beneficial. Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalise it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.

Much of the debate about SOPA and PIPA has thus far centred around the entertainment industry's absurdly inflated claims about the economic harm of copyright infringement. When making these calculations, intellectual property owners tend to assume that every unauthorised download represents a lost sale. This is clearly false. Often people copy a file illegally precisely because they're unwilling to pay the market price. Were unauthorised copying not an option, they would simply not watch the movie or listen to the album.

Dead weight bounce

Critics of industry estimates have repeatedly made this point and argued against the inflated figures used by SOPA and Protect IP boosters. But an equally large problem is the failure to consider the benefits of illegal downloading. These benefits can be a simple reduction of what economists call "dead-weight loss". Dead-weight loss exists any time the profit-maximising price of a unit of something exceeds the cost of producing an extra unit. In a highly competitive market in which many sellers are offering largely undifferentiated goods, profit margins are low and dead-weight loss is tiny. But the whole point of copyright is that the owner of the rights to, say, Breaking Bad has a monopoly on sales of new episodes of the show. At the same time, producing an extra copy of a Breaking Bad episode is nearly free. So when the powers that be decide that the profit-maximising strategy is to charge more than $100 to download all four seasons of Breaking Bad from iTunes, they're creating a situation in which lots of people who'd gain $15 or $85 worth of enjoyment from watching the show can't watch it. This is "dead-weight loss", and to the extent that copyright infringement reduces it, infringement is a boon to society.

After all, things like public libraries, used bookstores, and the widespread practice of lending books to friends all cost publishers money. But nobody (I hope) is going to introduce the Stop Used-Book Stores Now Act purely on these grounds. The public policy question is not whether the libraries are bad for publishers, but whether libraries are beneficial on balance.

Download or pizza?

By the same token, even when copyright infringement does lead to real loss of revenue to copyright owners, it's not as if the money vanishes into a black hole. Suppose Joe Downloader uses BitTorrent to get a free copy of Beggars Banquet rather than forking over $7.99 to Amazon, and then goes out to eat some pizza. In this case, the Rolling Stones's loss is the pizzeria's gain and Joe gets to listen to a classic album. It's at least not obvious that we should regard this, on balance, as harmful.

Meanwhile, the benefits of forcing copyright holders to compete with free-but-illegal downloads are considerable. I am not, personally, in the habit of infringing on copyrights (though I will cop to some book lending and the fact that my fianc?e and I, like any sensible couple, share Netflix and Hulu subscriptions) but recently have found myself firing up btjunkie.org again. Why? Because the BBC in its infinite wisdom decided to start airing season 2 of its excellent programme Sherlock in the UK without making it available at any price to Americans [including the author]. That's dumb, but until relatively recently it was a universal problem. It used to be that studios and labels didn't make their wares available to people willing to pay for them. That created an underground market for pirated TV shows and music. The pirated market, in turn, pressured the entertainment industry to create legal options such as iTunes and Hulu. The illegal competition is a valuable consumer pressure on the industry.

This is not to say that we should have no copyright law or that there should be no penalties for piracy. Used-book stores may slightly depress sales of new books, but they don't threaten to destroy the entire publishing industry. Large-scale, unimpeded, commercialised digital reproduction of other people's works really could destroy the US's creative industries. But the question to ask about the state of intellectual property policy is whether there's a problem from the consumer side. If infringement got out of hand, we might face a bleak scenario in which bands stop recording albums and no new TV shows are released.

Continue reading page |1 |2

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Moviegoers demand refunds for silent 'Artist'

The Weinstein Company

"The Artist" surprised some moviegoers in the U.K.

By Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

"The Artist" is earning acclaim, including three Golden Globes. But not everyone appreciates the black-and-white, almost entirely silent film.

British newspapers are reporting that some moviegoers there demanded refunds after starting to watch the film and discovering it's silent (a few lines are spoken near the end).

The U.K. paper The Telegraph said that theater staff had issued a "small number of refunds" to patrons who complained. The article also noted that patrons buying tickets to "The Artist" at one Liverpool theater were now being asked if they understood that the film was silent to stave off any future confusion.

A spokesman for the Odeon theater chain?told the paper?that?"the cinema is happy to offer guests a refund on their film choice is they raise concern with a member of staff within 10 minutes of the film starting."

In a similar incident from October of 2011,?a Michigan woman actually sued the studio that released Ryan Gosling's "Drive," claiming, among other things, that the trailer billed the dark drama as an action film along the lines of the "Fast & Furious" series. The suit actually called out the movie for having "very little driving."

The "Drive" and "Artist" incidents raise the question: Why do people who don't bother to research a movie before paying money to see it think their ignorance is the moviemaker's problem?

We can imagine the future lawsuits this trend could produce. "I thought 'Easy A' was a guide to rocks-for-jocks college classes!" "I believed 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'?was a rock concert movie filmed from the front row!" "I expected 'Friends With Benefits' to be an instructional dating film!" Or even: "War Horse" had too much "War," not enough "Horse!"

Perhaps the movie title that applies here is "Dumb and Dumber."

Ever been surprised by a film that wasn't what you were expecting? Tell us on Facebook.

Source: http://entertainment.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/18/10181652-moviegoers-demand-money-back-because-artist-is-silent

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Japan official wary of Iran sanctions impact (AP)

TOKYO ? Japan's finance minister expressed concern Wednesday about the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions on Iran and their potential impact on Japanese banks.

Jun Azumi's comments came as a delegation U.S. government officials began talks with Japanese counterparts about the sanctions targeting Iran's oil industry in a bid to thwart what Western governments say is an effort to develop nuclear weapons.

Japan has given mixed signals on the sanctions. Azumi declared last week that Japan would move quickly to reduce its oil imports from Iran after meeting with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, but other officials including the prime minister have said economic implications need to be considered.

Azumi also struck a more cautious tone Wednesday, telling journalists at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan that if the sanctions were imposed immediately, they could sustain "tremendous" damage to Japanese banks. The sanctions would bar financial institutions from the American market if they do business with Iran's central bank.

"We want to take steps to keep the damage to the Japanese economy to a minimum," Azumi said.

Japan imports about 9 percent of its oil from Iran and has been steadily reducing that percentage in recent years. Analysts say Japan will likely turn to other major oil suppliers to offset any further declines from Iran.

Azumi said he understood the potential danger of Iran's nuclear program, but also acknowledged "there were some concerns" that the sanctions would not be effective in convincing Iranian authorities.

He added that "Russia and China hold the keys to resolving this situation."

China, the world's biggest energy consumer, remains unwilling to back an oil embargo against Iran. South Korea also has remained non-committal.

Visiting U.S. officials met with Japanese counterparts for about 90 minutes Wednesday to discuss how the sanctions might be implemented.

"It was clear that we share an interest in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons," said Robert Einhorn, the State Department's special advisor on nonproliferation and arms control.

Einhorn said the two sides also shared the importance of a "dual-track" strategy in dealing with Iran involving both pressure and engagement.

Earlier in the day, Azumi met with U.K. Chancellor of Exchequer George Osborne to discuss trade, Iran and other matters. Osbourne told reporers that the British government appreciated that it is not easy for Japan to switch nearly one tenth of its oil supplies quickly.

But he said the two countries agreed it is not acceptable for Iran to continue to develop a nuclear weapon and that "we are prepared to use the tools available to us in the international community to stop that happening."

Tehran says its nuclear program is for civilian energy use and scientific research.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/japan/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120118/ap_on_bi_ge/as_japan_iran_oil

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'Artist,' 'Tinker Tailor' up for UK film awards (AP)

LONDON ? It's spry versus spy as frothy silent movie "The Artist" and moody thriller "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" lead the race for the British Academy Film Awards, Britain's equivalent of the Oscars.

"The Artist" received 12 nominations and "Tinker Tailor" 11, with each film up for best picture and director, and best actor nominations for leading men Jean Dujardin and Gary Oldman.

The other best-film nominees, announced at a ceremony Tuesday by actors Daniel Radcliffe and Holliday Grainger, were "The Descendants," "Drive" and "The Help."

In a diverse field not dominated by any single film, there are also multiple nominations for "Hugo," "My Week With Marilyn," "The Iron Lady" and "The Help."

The nominations are another feather in the cap of "The Artist," a black and white French film about a silent screen star's fall with the rise of talkies that has become an unlikely hit. On Sunday it won three Golden Globes, including best musical or comedy film.

Director Michael Hazanavicius said Tuesday he and his crew had been "a bit mad to make a black-and-white silent film in 2011."

"We certainly hoped to find an audience, but the support we have received from so many people in so many different countries was unexpected, overwhelming and quite wonderful," he said.

The shortlist gives a boost to "Tinker Tailor," an atmospheric adaptation of John le Carre's espionage classic that has received rave reviews but has so far been snubbed during the U.S. awards season.

"Tinker Tailor" producer Tim Bevan said the film was a "particularly British cultural phenomenon. It's great that it's being recognized at the BAFTAs but that it hasn't at the Golden Globes is not surprising."

"'The Artist' seems to be the film with the momentum, and rightly so," he said. "It's been an OK year but not a brilliant year for movies, and 'The Artist' defines what cinema should be. It's brave, different, it's got a great shot."

The best actor contest pits Oldman and Dujardin against Brad Pitt for "Moneyball," George Clooney for "The Descendants" and Michael Fassbender for "Shame."

The best actress category includes two performers playing real-life icons ? Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in "My Week With Marilyn" and Meryl Streep as former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady."

Streep, who has been widely praised for her performance, said the nomination was "thrilling news ... Not just for me, but for the film of which I am very proud, and for the hundreds of people who worked on it! Thanks, from a (New) Jersey girl."

The other nominees are Berenice Bejo for "The Artist," Tilda Swinton for "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and Viola Davis for "The Help."

The prizes will be awarded at a ceremony at London's Royal Opera House on Feb. 12. They are considered an important indicator of prospects at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles two weeks later.

In recent years, the awards, known as BAFTAs, have helped small British films gain momentum for Hollywood success.

In 2010, Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" won seven BAFTAs, including best film; it went on to take eight Oscars. Last year "The King's Speech" won seven BAFTAs and four Oscars, including best picture.

"My Week With Marilyn," the story of the movie legend's time shooting an ill-starred comedy in England, received six BAFTA nominations, including a supporting-actor nod for Kenneth Branagh, who plays Laurence Olivier.

He is up against Christopher Plummer for "Beginners," Jim Broadbent for "The Iron Lady," Jonah Hill for "Moneyball" and Philip Seymour Hoffman for "The Ides of March."

The supporting actress category features Carey Mulligan for "Drive," Jessica Chastain for "The Help," Judi Dench for "My Week With Marilyn," Melissa McCarthy for "Bridesmaids" and Olivia Spencer for "The Help."

The multinational best-director contest pits Hazanavicius against Denmark's Nicholas Winding Refn, for the turbocharged "Drive," Sweden's Tomas Alfredson for "Tinker Tailor," Britain's Lynne Ramsay for "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and Martin Scorsese of the United States for "Hugo."

The best British film category contains "My Week With Marilyn," racing documentary "Senna," sex-addiction drama "Shame," family tragedy "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."

Steven Spielberg's equine adventure "War Horse" was overlooked in the major categories but gained five nominations, including cinematography, visual effects and music.

___

On the Net: http://www.bafta.org

Jill Lawless can be reached at: http://twitter.com/JillLawless

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/movies/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120117/ap_on_en_mo/eu_britain_film_awards

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